Thursday, October 21, 2010

Playing It Old School

My 13-year-old cousin has been bringing his Atari to our house and letting Marguerite, et al, play. That’s old school. However, it’s still a video game, no matter how vintage. Anyway, he’s just doing it for kicks, thinking it’s a hoot because the technology is 30 years old, lol. I see no harm in letting Marguerite try it out. She also fiddles around with a PSP and that Nintendo thing when they’re in her vicinity, but we don’t have our own video games except the ones on our phones (even then, her favorite game on Mark’s phone is the one where she tickles this virtual cat or she says things and the cat repeats what she said in a meow voice – watch out, I think I may have promised her a cat as soon as we get our own place, hehe) and she knows the phones are not really for playing video games. As much as she thinks video games are interesting, she finds board games even more so. They’re more tangible for one. She has most of the staples – chutes and ladders, checkers, chess, scrabble, etc. She loves to set the play pieces next to each other in organized rows. Naturally, she doesn’t know how to play them properly yet. I’d love a complete set of all the traditional board games for all of us. I just really like those old games. For instance, I don’t see a lot of backgammon sets anymore. I’m definitely getting one for Marguerite. It’s a cool game. I remember this very moving scene from the old TV movie “Raid on Entebbe”. I think Yoni Netanyahu and the character that James Wood played were playing backgammon with a couple of other guys on the plane to Entebbe and then suddenly somebody started singing “Hine Ma Tov” (love this song!) and then the entire plane of soldiers was suddenly thundering the song in a kind of victory/praise moment. I’d really love a copy of that movie.